My name is Dennis Travis. From 2020 - 2026 I served as Mayor for Halstead, KS. I have a cautionary tale to share concerning utility-scale BESS.

First, a little about myself.

I grew up in Cumberland, IA in the heart of corn country. My brothers and I grew up on 28 acres where we broke horses, rode in rodeos and grew up country as can be. We were surrounded by family farms and were four miles outside of an agriculture based community of 300. Two cities combined for our school system. I graduated in 1986 with 27 other kids.

My allergies and asthma were not conducive for a career in agriculture so after graduation I attended electronics school in Wichita, KS. It didn’t take long for me to realize I didn’t want to be stuck in a lab or a factory all day, so I entered the IBEW apprenticeship program and sought my Journeyman inside-wireman certification which I completed in 1995. In 1998 the NJATC asked me to come back as an instructor for the program which I did. I worked as an electrician around the Wichita area for 10 years specializing in instrumentation and control work. In 1999 I was offered a technical sales position for one of the companies that called on me, where I’ve been ever since. Over the last 27 years I have helped engineer, design, implement and commission controls and instrumentation for clients across the western 2/3 of Kansas. I have operated at a very high competency level and have built a reputation as a go-to guy for process problems and solutions. 

The opportunity.

Three years ago, as Mayor when a BESS opportunity came calling in Halstead, I felt I had a leg up, as I already had a general understanding of the project and the majority of the components involved. The only part I needed to educate myself on was the chemistry of the batteries, so I dove in.

Why did they pick Halstead? Our existing i2 Industrial park has an Evergy substation with the capacity to take the connection. I believe we have more power available than the industrial park in Newton. That being said we had a major piece of the infrastructure needed for the project that was already existing. Basically we have the “field of dreams” for a project of this nature. 

At the same time, the developer needed to secure control of the particular parcel of ground for their project to make application to the Southwest Power Pool, to show they could potentially complete the project if the connection study proved to be feasible. Our city agreed to a lease to allow them to show control of the parcel. Although this lease allowed for ground studies and such, it would NOT allow for ANY construction. 

It was at that point that we (the city) could have put the developer into the special use permit process and allowed them to make application for permitting. I didn’t like that idea, and wanted full transparency on the project, so instead, I requested that the governing board task the planning and zoning board (P&Z Board) with developing regulations for BESS, BEFORE allowing the developer to seek a permit. Everyone agreed and we moved forward with developing regulations.

This decision would prove to be a disaster, as it gave time for public social media opposition to build and metastasize.

The P&Z board worked for 18 months on regulations that never got adopted. Keep in mind that we don’t have a professional full-time planner on staff to guide our P&Z board like larger cities do.

I sat in a few of the  P&Z meetings and watched as our chair took changes in the language for the proposed regulations from people in the audience who were adamantly opposed to this project. This was a highly unusual way to develop regulations. I’ve never seen anything like that and I still can’t believe it happened. But as Mayor, I felt I had to participate as an observer only.

The proposed regulations were decent, but highly redundant. A third party review by attorneys out of Wichita showed as much. The best way to regulate the installation of BESS was to adopt NFPA 855 and require engineering studies that would be peer reviewed before any permitting was allowed to take place. 

During this regulation process, local social media pages were blowing up.

I had a personal Facebook page that pre-dated my campaign for Mayor. When my personal page was attacked with derogatory comments, I felt justified in deleting them. The angry anti-BESS group accused me of violating peoples rights.

There were posts stating I was being paid under the table or my company somehow was benefitting from this project being approved. None of that was true and would never happen; my integrity is far too important to me. There was even a recall attempt made on my office. The Harvey County Attorney dismissed it, due to no merit. 

The anti-BESS group in Halstead were the perpetrators of personal attacks on me and my character. They were perpetrators of an all-out fear campaign against the technology as well.

Now mind you, I never once advocated for approval of the BESS project. I only advocated to take it through the proper steps, do the engineering studies and make a decision based on peer review of that data. 

During the process, the anti-BESS group focused on fear of the Lithium-Ion battery portion of the project. There are several Lithium chemistries used, with the most prevalent being NMC and Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP). LFP has the lower fire danger of the two.  Interestingly enough, our local school had three brand new electric school busses that used very large (150kWh+) NMC battery packs, sitting under our children, and nobody in town had a negative word to say about them. But the batteries in the proposed BESS were not afforded such niceties. By the way, our electric busses continue to operate to this day. 

To appease the fears of the anti-BESS group, I even sought out and found other technologies that were non-lithium and were non-flammable. One of those being a Zinc Bromide solution that would be non-flammable, non-toxic and would seem to check every box of concern for the anti-BESS group. They REFUSED to acknowledge it even existed. The Zinc Bromide company I researched is now engaged with the US Government, providing BESS on some of our military bases.

To make a long story shorter, the anti-BESS group was able take fear to a new level and get a 10 year BESS moratorium on the ballot in Halstead through a petition drive. I was also up for re-election. The 2025 election results? I am no longer Mayor, and Halstead has a 10 year moratorium on utility scale BESS. The proposed BESS project is dead, and we have no BESS regulations. Interestingly enough, large residential BESS was spared from the moratorium. Large residential LITHIUM BESS that could be installed in ones garage. By a DIYer. With no inspections. Right next to a gas powered auto, and a 5-gallon gas can for the mower.

The aftermath.

The BESS developer had an original proposal on the table to pay Halstead $500,000.00/year over the next 20 years = $10M, which would have been a 20% increase in our budget and paid the city directly more per square foot of ground than any other viable economic opportunity. I believe the final negotiation could have been $1M + / per year, if aggressively pursued, but we were never given the opportunity to get to that stage. 

Losing the opportunity, or losing my office, is not what bothers me about this story.

What bothers me is a group of activists stopped the process of writing regulations, and properly vetting and reviewing a project, based only on FEAR. The proposed project wasn’t going into residents backyards; if approved it was going into an i2 Industrial park where it belongs. This is land next to a major substation and several hundred feet away from busy train tracks. Land set aside by our forefathers for projects like this to aide with the city’s financial stability well into the future.

Small cities across the state of Kansas are all facing the same issues. Operating costs continue to go up, as you have to be competitive with wages to attract good candidates for positions. Health insurance continues to rise and is generally a huge budget item for a city. There are two ways to tackle rising costs in a city, raise taxes or encourage economic development. While residential development is nice and brings new homes to your community, the revenue isn’t nearly as good as commercial development.

Instead of being forward thinking and striving to be a partner for commercial development to help with our financial future, our governing body now in Halstead is looking at cuts across the budget, including funding for various local items that have always been there to support the community. We now have a reputation for being un-welcoming to commercial development, which will be with us for the next 20 years.

At some point, with this mindset, we may lose services like 24-hour policing and fire/EMS, city wide cleanups and brush hauling, etc.

The future.

We will see more growth across the energy spectrum in the next 10-20 years than we can imagine. Nuclear, natural gas, wind, solar and BESS will all play their parts in that growth. Data centers will be a large part of future demand as will be consumers switching to electric cars and heat pumps. I believe these commercial projects are necessary to provide the access, connectivity and standard of living that we have become accustomed to, and that our children demand.

I also believe there are fly-by-night developers out there that will try to take advantage of small communities. These communities need to get regulations in place for their protection, and be willing to come to the table fully prepared. I don’t believe these projects should come with incentives or tax abatements; if they are that important to our future they shouldn’t need them. However, some cities will offer incentives and abatements to get the opportunity.

Done correctly, these projects could be huge economic boosters for rural Kansas communities, but they need to be thoroughly vetted and need to be a win-win to be successful.

Make no mistakes, I have the same concerns over water and environmental impacts that everybody else does, but with my background, I believe modern engineering, and good regulations, can mitigate most of the problems of the past to make these good projects for the communities they’re in. 

After my last three years of investigation of suppliers, developers and regulations, if I were vetting a BESS project today I would be most comfortable with NFPA-855 regulated projects with EOS Indensity non-flammable batteries and Ameresco Energy as the system developer. I would also require an array of plans and studies to support the project.

As for the pitchforks and torches anti-BESS activists, who organize in hidden social media groups, I don’t have any solutions. We offered them experts; they offered fear. We offered non-flammable battery options; they didn’t care. In the end, they won, and we ALL lost.

Like I said at the beginning, a cautionary tale.

-Dennis Travis, former Mayor of Halstead, KS -2020 to 2026

Proposed BESS Site in i2 Industrial zone, western edge of Halstead KS